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33 New Content Marketing Statistics You Need for Your 2019 Strategy

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By Ramona Sukhraj

Recently, I found myself looking at a movie poster thinking, “what weird content” and was quickly taken aback.

Not because the poster was that appalling, but because I referred to it as “content.”

A great marketer and friend of mine once wrote, “everything the light touches is content” — and she’s right.

Turn back the clock to 2008 and when you heard the term “content marketing,” people were most likely referring to written blogs, but the landscape has expanded and evolved dramatically in the past decade.

Today, content takes the form of video, imagery, quizzes, social media stories, GIFs, Google Ads, printed posters, and even words across a t-shirt.

If your organization isn’t investing in it in one form or another, it’s very much in the minority.

According to the “B2B Content Marketing 2019” Report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, 58% of marketers reported spending more on content creation in 2018 than in 2017.

Despite challenges from SEO/search (61% of marketers said they’re concerned about these), social media algorithm changes, and hurdles turning content into a revenue stream (noted by 41%), the industry is clearly only growing.

With this in mind, below I’ve gathered 33 new and eye-opening content marketing statistics to give you insight into the current competition and help you shape your strategy for 2019.

Content Marketing Strategy Statistics

1. In 2018, only 39% of content marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. That number, however, jumps to 65% among top performing organizations. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

2. Despite concerns about algorithms and organic reach, only 3% of B2B marketers have decreased their social media use in the past year. 61% have increased. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

3. 54% of marketers feel they’re not maximizing their use of Instagram to achieve their goals. (Contently & Libris)

4. Only 54% of B2B  marketers are using content to “delight” and build loyalty with existing clients/customers. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

5. 64% of B2B marketers place importance on building relationships with influencers (i.e. brand advocates, journalists, etc.) (CMI & MarketingProfs), and 65% of B2B buyers prefer credible content from industry influencers (Demand Gen Report 2018 Content Preferences Survey Report)

Yet…

6. Only 24% of B2B marketers are actually partnering with others to expand their audience reach. (CMI & MarketingProfs).

7. Only 27% of B2B marketers are using content syndication/promotional tools. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

8. 75% of content marketers report using technology to gain insight into how their content is performing, while only 56% use it to gain insight into audience preferences and behavior. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

9. 90% of the most successful B2B content marketers prioritize their audience’s informational needs over their own sales/promotional message. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

However…

10. Only 42% of B2B content marketers are actually talking to customers to understand their needs when it comes to content. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

Audience Behaviour & Preferences

11. 71% of buyers/readers say they were turned off by content that seems like a sales pitch. (Economist Group’s “Missing the Mark”)

12. 71% of B2B buyers said they consumed blog content during their buyer’s journey. That’s up from 66% in 2017. (Demand Gen Report 2018 Content Preferences Survey Report)

13. 64% of B2B buyers noted they give more credence to peer reviews, user-generated feedback, and third-party publications and analysts over that of brands. (Demand Gen Report 2018 Content Preferences Survey Report)

14. 64% of B2B buyers report they would like to see content organized by industry on company websites, followed by business role (52%), vertical (46%), size of organization (18%), or location/region (14%). (Demand Gen Report 2018 Content Preferences Survey Report)

15. 52% of buyers strongly agree that if brands packaged relevant content together, it would help expedite the research phase. (Demand Gen Report 2018 Content Preferences Survey Report)

16. Roughly 84% of buyers said they either frequently or occasionally access business-related content on their smartphone. (Demand Gen Report 2018 Content Preferences Survey Report)

17. 66% of B2B buyers strongly agree that companies should make it easier to access their content, by using fewer form fields, better mobile optimization, etc. (Demand Gen Report 2018 Content Preferences Survey Report)

Content Marketing Mediums & Tactics

18. In 2018, B2B marketers rate blog articles as the most effective content format in the awareness stage, whitepapers during consideration, and case studies during decision. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

19. 62% of marketers use stock photography/videography for their content. (Contently & Libris)

20. 33% of marketers report custom video drives the most engagement out of all visual content for them, but only 6% reported live video specifically (*TRIVIA ANSWER*). (Contently & Libris)

21. 64% of B2B marketers increased their use of audio/visual content in the past year, but only 43% of marketers overall actually used/developed video snippets. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

This may be because…

22. 81% of respondents claim video is still the hardest type of content to produce (Contently & Libris)

(Note: Pst… We can help with that.)

23. 70% of marketers reported that content incorporating visuals assets performed better than those without. (Contently & Libris)

24. Only 7% of B2B marketers report using chatbots in their marketing; Only 4% are using AI. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

25. 87% of marketers are using still email to nurture their audience, while only 45% are using storytelling. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

25. Only 23% of marketers are incorporating interactive features into their content; That number only rises slightly to 37% among top performers. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

26. 74% of B2B marketers created long-form written content in the past year. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

27. Only 37% of people dedicated time to producing social media story content in the past year. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

28. 64% said they prefer podcasts at the top-of-the-funnel, while 48% said webinars were valuable to them in the mid-stage of their buying journey. (Demand Gen Report 2018 Content Preferences Survey Report)

Content Marketing Distribution Statistics

29. 71% of the most successful b2b content marketers are using paid methods to distribute content, compared to only 55% of the least successful. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

30. 80% report paid distribution as an effective way to attract a new audience, while 65% report it as an effective way to generate traffic when organic isn’t delivering. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

31. 70% of marketers are using paid distribution on social media; 64% are using PPC or search engine advertising. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

Content Marketing Budget & Reporting Statistics

32. Over 50% of marketers expect to increase their content marketing budget in 2018. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

33. When asked if they’re tracking their content marketing ROI, 51% of marketers either said “no” or “unsure.” — Only 25% report being extremely proficient in tracking their content marketing metrics overall. (CMI & MarketingProfs)

Set the Scene for 2019

The new year will be here before we know it and in our volatile industry, when the calendar turns a page, your strategy will likely need to as well. So, don’t phone it in! Use the statistics above to inform and guide some game-changing content marketing experiments in 2019.

By Ramona Sukhraj

Sourced from IMPACT

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The Role of Video in Content Marketing

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By Ana Gotter    

When you think of the term “content marketing,” what pops into your head? If you’re like most people, you likely think of blog posts. Maybe some ebooks or extended guides. If you’re also like most people, you likely won’t think “video”– but you should.

While video has been used more for other types of marketing in the past, it has a solid place in content marketing. Videos are incredible mediums for storytelling and relationship building, after all, and though those features can enhance an ad, they also speak to the core purpose of content marketing. Copy is meant to sell; content informs and build relationships.

So what exactly is the role of video in content marketing? In this post, we’re going to discuss why video is so vital to content marketing and how you can use it to improve the results you’re already getting in every way.

Why Video Should Be a Vital Part of Your Content Marketing

One thing I want to clear up really quickly is the difference between copy and advertising and content marketing.

Copy and advertising focused on selling something immediately. It’s meant to drive immediate action. It’s brief and to the point.

Content might still encourage you to take certain actions, but it’s more about storytelling, informing, and establishing relationships. You’re providing value and drawing customers in that way instead of going for the hard sales pitch.

A lot of businesses focus on video exclusively in advertising. They create hard-hitting explainer videos meant to drive sales instantly. This is obviously effective, and we write about it a great deal on this blog. But it’s not the only way to use video.

Video is an outstanding medium for content marketing, and I’ve argued in the past that video is so content-oriented that YouTube should be approached as a content marketing platform instead of a social media one. It can be used to provide exceptional value in a quick, digestible way that audiences will be happy to engage with and share.

It helps that video is a compact form of content. Instead of copy/pasting an entire blog post and its supporting images into a Facebook post (which no one would ever do), people can just share your video with a simple click.

How to Improve Content Marketing with Video

Video has a lot of benefits and a lot of diverse use cases. Let’s take a look at the four biggest ways you should be using it to improve your content marketing campaigns across the board.

Create Standalone Video Content

We’re seeing more and more long form content being shared across multiple platforms, to the point where we’ve even seen an emergence of platforms like IGTV.

Video content that’s meant to engage with users, teach them, or offer value to them in some other way is a great way to enhance your content marketing. You’re adding a new medium of content that’s engaging and easy for users to process quickly.

And sometimes, video can capture a subject more efficiently than even the best-written blog post ever could. Instead of writing a blog post about how to fix the engine of the car, for example, it would likely be a lot more effective to watch a video going over the same thing. It’s easier for people to understand, and it can often get the point across much more quickly.

Sometimes video tutorials are more beneficial than text-based how-tos. In this case, you’ll see videos appearing high in the SERPs.

Your standalone video content can truly standalone, existing in separate campaigns from your blog or lead magnets, but it can also work alongside it. Cover similar topics, and then send users back and forth from your videos to your blog and vice versa.

Embed Videos in Blog Posts

Once you’ve got that video content up and running, embed them in relevant blog posts. Are you talking about overall car maintenance? Insert that video showing how to change an engine in the appropriate section, embedding it into the post. This adds value for your readers, it makes your content more engaging, and it even gives you a new type of goal to track in Google Analytics; (you can actually see how many users click to play your videos).

Videos appearing in blog posts do count as additional media, and the more thoroughly you’re able to cover a single subject, the happier your readers will be.

Use .SRT Files to Improve SEO

We already know that captions are important to include on videos, especially with 85% of videos being played on Facebook without any sound. Including closed captions to counteract this trend is important, but they have another great use, too.

When you use .SRT files to create closed captions for your video, you’re also giving your video content a big SEO boost that will help you to attract relevant traffic. Google can’t crawl videos, but they can crawl .SRT files, which are essentially text transcripts that you embed into the video.

This gives you an enormous SEO advantage, because you can hit a lot of keywords you weren’t even targeting directly and show up in more relevant feeds.

If you’re not sure how to create an .SRT file, it’s easier than you think, especially if you use YouTube. You can see how here.

Create Videos to Promote Your Content

Even if you’re most comfortable sticking with blog posts as your primary form of content, you can still use video to send more traffic your way.

As a part of Shakr’s content marketing strategy, we create short announcement videos for our blog posts using our high-performing video templates. We feature the blog title in short, 5-second-long videos that we share on social media. Since videos are often favored in feeds and immediately suck you into watching, it’s been an effective strategy that we’re sticking to (at least for now!).

Conclusion

Blog posts are the staple of most brands’ content marketing strategies, but that definitely doesn’t mean they should be the only part. Video can help your marketing efforts by enhancing the content itself, providing new content available to you, helping you connect with your audience, and making it easier to promote the posts you already have. It’s a valuable and flexible asset, and it should be treated as such.

Feature Image Credit: Free-Photos / Pixabay

By Ana Gotter    

Sourced from Business 2 Community

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6 Content Marketing Questions: Answers Will Improve Your Strategy

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By Ana Jovanovic

Content marketing is receiving tremendous acknowledgment among advertisers to reach clients. Indeed, 92% of B2B advertisers utilize content marketing to reach their intended interest group, and 86% B2C advertisers consider content marketing a key strategy to target clients, as indicated by the Content Marketing Institute.

In any case, not every single content marketers can accomplish their goals with regards to getting content marketing ROI. Some are effective, while many battles to attempt their content marketing endeavors productive.

In this post, the talk will be about six inquiries that will enable you to adjust your content marketing strategy and guarantee achievement.

1. What Problems Are You Solving?

The primary goal of your content marketing system is to solve your audience’s issues.

So the primary inquiry your content marketing strategy ought to have the capacity to answer what issues you are settling. What’s more, to take care of your clients’ issues, you ought to be very much aware of their pain points.

Here are some approaches to distinguish your clients’ pain points:

  • Conduct qualitative customer research
  • Interview your customers
  • Look at your reviews
  • Run online surveys
  • Scan forums/groups relevant to your niche

Content that goes head to head with the audience’s problems, get noticed, read and shared.

2. Have You set Objectives for Your Content Strategy?

Does your content marketing strategy have composed objectives? If not, you should set objectives now. Without defining objectives, it will resemble flying in obscurity and shooting randomly and hoping to hit the objective. Obviously, this isn’t something that you need to do. So set content marketing objectives. Following are some shared objectives that you might need to accomplish through content marketing:

  • Increase brand awareness
  • Increase traffic to your website
  • Generate Leads
  • Improve retention
  • Create customer loyalty

content marketing

3. Have You Fixed KPIs for Your Content Marketing Goals?

To know how much advancement you are making toward your content marketing objectives, you should track key performance indicators (KPIs).
Have you settled KPIs for your content marketing objectives?
Next, we should talk about regular KPIs you can append to your content marketing objectives:

Brand Awareness– Social share, comments, likes, views from partner sites
Traffic to Your Website– Google Analytics
Lead Generation– Leads generated by content, landing page conversion rate
Customer Loyalty– Repurchase, regular subscription
Leads Conversion– Leads to customer conversions through content pieces

4. Does Content Echo Your Audience’s Tone?

On the off chance that your audience didn’t feel right after reading your content, despite the fact that your content is super helpful, odds are your dialect is excessively straightforward or excessively complex that doesn’t match with the dialect of your audience.
So it is important that your substance should match with your gathering of people’s tone.
Furthermore, to figure out what tone is the best for you to embrace, you should know your audience and discover what they like and how they associate with one another.

5. Do You Have an Aggressive Content Promotion Plan?

Brian Clark, the founder of CopyBlogger, stated:

’’Creating great content and not getting it noticed is an online marketing sin.’’

There is no reason for making content if it doesn’t get noticed, read, and shared by your audience. Do you have a forceful content promotion strategy to make your content reach a vast audience? If not, act quick. You have the accompanying four content promotion channels:

1- Owned Channels– Homepage, email lists, owned communities, blog, app
2- Earned Channels– Influencer Outreach, media outreach, placed content
3- Shared Channels– social media organic, content sharing communities
4- Paid Channels– Native ads, paid social media, display ads, sponsored content

6. Are You Ready to Tweak Your Content Strategy?

A fruitful content marketing strategy requests a consistent cycle of investigation and changes. So you can’t settle your content procedure in a stone. You need to change it and adjust it depending on how your audience reacts to your content. The most ideal way is that you should make a rule of routinely assessing your content marketing strategy after a specific timeframe – track key performance indicators (KPIs) to know your advancement and discover the purposes behind not performing.

You should realize that content marketing sets aside some time to demonstrate results, however, the outcomes remain. It is smarter to set realistic content marketing strategy desires at first.

 

By Ana Jovanovic

Sourced from JOSIC

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Content marketing: Learn how to build a great content plan for your business

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By Megan Dunsby

If you want to develop a successful content strategy for your small business then this webinar will show you the way.

Hosted by Peter Meinertzhagen, head of content at Nominet, the session will teach you what content marketing is, why it’s so important in web development, and how you can start to create a clear-cut content strategy.

You’ll learn:

  • The defining goals needed for a successful content strategy
  • How to identify target audiences
  • What types of content you should be creating, and how
  • How to promote content – including what free channels and paid channels you should consider
  • And, finally, what metrics you should be measuring to gauge whether your content strategy is working.

Meinertzhagen also addresses some of the common misconceptions of content marketing such as the myth that it only relates to blogging and that content marketing can’t be measured (when indeed it can!).

You’ll also gain a full understanding of the benefits of content marketing.

An effective content marketing strategy can support greater brand awareness, improved audience engagement, increased website traffic, leads for your business, improved marketing ROI, and can even support customer retention and loyalty.

We bring you this webinar in partnership with The UK Domain by Nominet. We’ve got tons more expert advice like this in our Building a website channel.

And, if you’d like more information on how to grow your business online, you can get your hands on our free ebook here which has 50 great tips to build a website from some of the UK’s best and brightest entrepreneurs.

By Megan Dunsby

Sourced from Startups

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How to Come Up with the Big Idea for Your Content Marketing Strategy

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Every great product or brand starts with an idea. But how does an idea grow into a big idea that stops your audience in their tracks? 

It’s easy to fall into the trap of producing content without a clear idea behind your content strategy. If your organic traffic isn’t growing month over month, or if you find yourself continually spending advertising budget to acquire readers, this probably means that your content strategy lacks a big idea.

If your organic traffic isn’t growing month over month, or if you find yourself continually spending advertising budget to acquire readers, this probably means that your content strategy lacks a big idea. Click To Tweet

Advertising tycoon David Ogilvy famously said: 

You will never win fame and fortune unless you invent big ideas. It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”

David Ogilvy was absolutely right.

Which book has a better big idea: Rich Dad Poor Dad or 101 Ways to Find the Money to Save and Invest?

rich dad poor dad investTake a look at these two financial self-help books, for instance. Both books teach the principles of saving and investing money. But, can you guess which title sold more copies?

Rich Dad Poor Dad is an international bestseller, yet 101 Ways to Find the Money to Save and Invest is mostly unknown. As we further explore the concept of the big idea, it will quickly become apparent that Rich Dad Poor Dad has a big idea behind it. This is because a title like Rich Dad Poor Dad stands out from all other books about saving and investing. The big idea behind this book has easily cut through the noise and captured any potential readers’ attention.

Let’s delve deeper and explore how you can develop a big idea that works and leads to exponential growth in organic traffic: the ultimate goal for many businesses.

How do you create your big idea for content marketing?

At this stage, you may be wondering where creating your “big idea” fits in your inbound marketing strategy? The answer is it’s the crucial first step in your inbound and content marketing planning process.

If you’re already part way through your content marketing strategy but don’t yet have a big idea in place, don’t panic: this is the time to audit your approach.

1. First, you need to take a step back and consider your buyer persona. Think about the customer you’re trying to reach. Ask yourself:

  • Who is your target customer?
  • How do they go from awareness to decision?
  • What do they want to see?

2. Next, you need to attract your target customer’s interest. One way to do this is to apply the concept of creating unfamiliarity into what they’re already familiar with, or vice versa.

Here’s an example of introducing familiarity with what may seem unfamiliar to your audience: cryptocurrency. Most people have a sketchy understanding of what Bitcoin is. But if one were to explain Bitcoin as a form of “digital gold,” most people would be able to grasp that concept easily since ‘digital’ and ‘gold’ are things that people are already familiar with.

tangle teezer

An example of creating unfamiliarity into what people are familiar with would be the wildly successful product, Tangle Teezer, the de-tangling hairbrush. Everyone is familiar with a hairbrush. But a hairbrush that specializes in de-tangling your hair? That’s a novel idea!

Tangle Teezer’s brand success started with a big idea, and inbound traffic grew organically. This product very effectively fulfills its promise to quickly and painlessly de-tangle hair, and customers promptly told their friends. Tangle Teezer became a self-promoting brand.

As you move further through the process of finding your big idea, a memorable and straightforward method is to follow the acronym of B-I-G.

Click To Tweet

B: Buzzworthy

Ask yourself: does your idea capture people’s attention?

Talk about your big idea to your friends and colleagues. Are they interested? Do they want to find out more? Ask your colleagues and carefully watch their reaction. Is this an idea that you want to talk about with your friends? Also, consider if there are any market trends that you can leverage to create a content strategy around.

I: Incomparability

As a company or brand, you must stand out from your competitors and create a product that solves a problem.  There are three ways to do this:

1. Genuine Incomparability. Your products are truly unique. Most of us, unfortunately, don’t fall into this category as this requires inventing a product with an exclusive patent. For most products and brands, the next two strategies are more realistic.

2. Industrial Incomparability. You create your big idea around something that your industry competitors may already be doing, but they don’t talk about it in their content strategy. 

toms shoes

Let’s take TOMS shoes as an example. For every pair of TOMS shoes sold, another pair is gifted to a person in need, and customers are made aware of their contribution. Customers feel good about their purchase, and TOMS stands out in a hugely competitive market.

3. Created Incomparability. This is the key to coming up with a big idea that works. You need to find something exciting and compelling about your product to help it stand apart from competitors.

Imagine you work for a company selling health supplements for children, and you need to market vitamin D supplements. If you only list the benefits of vitamin D, most of your audiences will quickly lose attention — especially kids!  To grow your organic inbound traffic and increase product awareness, you need to think differently about your product.

Perhaps as you carry out some research on vitamin D, you discover that astronauts used it during space missions. Suddenly, vitamin D could potentially become the “Astronaut’s Vitamin”. Kids are fascinated by astronauts and intrigued by your product. And parents have the option to purchase an attractive health supplement that their children are excited to take. 

You’re not selling anything different, but you’ve found a creative way to make your product seem unique.

G: Gargantuan Goal

And now we come to your Gargantuan Goal. Ask yourself one simple question: what is the biggest problem you’re trying to solve for your audience?

It’s time to revisit your buyer persona and think about what triggered their customer journey. 

Let’s go back to the Tangle Teezer hairbrush. Its gargantuan goal is simply to provide a solution to the annoying problem of trying to de-tangle your hair. It solves its buyer persona’s biggest problem.

An Example of a Company with an Awesome B-I-G Idea: FrogTape

Finally, let’s look at a brand that successfully demonstrates the B-I-G acronym in action: the painting tape brand, FrogTape.

FrogTape’s content marketing focuses on its ability to achieve clean, sharp lines with no paint bleed. It creates the concept of PaintBlock Technology. PaintBlock Technology is buzzworthy — it immediately intrigues people. They want to find out more. FrogTape effectively inserts the unfamiliar into the familiar.

FrogTape's content marketing

FrogTape shares painting tips, how-tos, and inspiration as part of their content marketing.

FrogTape also successfully harnesses “Created Incomparability”. It creates the idea of PaintBlock Technology to keep your paint lines straight and sharp. 

FrogTape’s “Gargantuan Goal” is to convince its customers to use FrogTape to create clean lines and avoid the worst-case-scenario of having to repaint a room.

Every aspect of FrogTape’s content marketing strategy then links back to this big idea. Even the design trends on FrogTape’s website have subtle relevance to the big idea: their “Paint Block” technology. 

Get your big idea right, and you’re ready to soar.

Your big idea is the beating heart of your product or brand. Every piece of content you create about your product has to link back to your big idea. It can be subtle, but it has to be there.

By 

Marcus Ho is the founder of the digital and content marketing agency, Brew Interactive. The agency specializes in working with financial and real estate brands to leverage content strategies that will drive their business goals. He is also the author of the highly-rated book, Social Payoff

Sourced from CONVINCE&CONVERT

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8 Successful Examples Of Mind-Blowing Content Marketing

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By Mark Delarika 

Content marketing is a marketing strategy focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a target audience. The key words here are ‘valuable’ and ‘relevant’. Each content piece should communicate your message in a way that adds value to your readers, answers their real questions, piques and expands their interests, and makes them trust you and your brand.

As with any other marketing technique, the final goal of content marketing is to, also, convince readers and eventually turn them into buyers, but this is not the initial intention, rather the desired outcome. Still, content marketing turns out to be pretty profitable for all sorts of businesses promoting themselves online. 61% of U.S. online consumers make a purchase based on recommendations they’ve read on a blog, and 79% of them spend half their time researching their products.

61% of U.S. online consumers make a purchase based on recommendations they’ve read on a blog

This is just part of the reason why 53% of businesses are investing in content marketing, and 55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority in 2018 as well. Compared to outbound marketing, well planned, quality and helpful content can generate 3 times as many leads and costs 62% less.

If you’re still on the fence about the benefits of content marketing, even after these statistics, following are eight great examples of effective use of content to reach out and expand an audience, and how and why these companies’ strategies worked.

American Express

OPEN Forum, American Express’ website dedicated to the U.S. small business community, is one of the greatest success stories in content marketing.

It all started in 2007. Recognizing its position as one of the leading payment card providers for U.S. small businesses and its inextricable connection with their success, Amex decided to take a turn in a different direction. Their marketers started focusing more on what’s truly helpful for their large customer base, creating quality content on topics their readers are interested in. They were talking less about their cards and other products, and more about what actually helps the community thrive.

The efforts were recognized by businesses, and by 2010 OPEN Forum reached a million monthly visitors, and had over 11,000 new small business subscribers. The community continually grew through the years and is still a great place for small businesses to look for help and advice, as well as to speak out their mind.

Airbnb

Another mind-blowing example of top-notch content marketing is that of Airbnb. Their travel guidebooks and user-generated neighborhood guides are full of high-quality content, paired with locals’ advice and suggestions to make the most of your time in their city.

Storytelling is probably the greatest strength of Airbnb’s content marketing strategy and a fuel to its success. The website and app give travelers a chance to feel the local experience of the place they’re visiting, as well as share more in-depth information for those who want to know more. It’s a unique approach that triggers people’s excitement by seeing the places that make Airbnb what it is, in their true, authentic beauty.

In 10 years, the company has grown into a multibillion-dollar business, with more than 4 million listings and is now active in 190 countries worldwide. However, maintaining their brand community is still their highest priority.

Whole Foods

What makes Whole Foods different from any other supermarket chain is the way they’ve positioned themselves as a healthy lifestyle choice, embracing healthy and earth-conscious living every step of the way. And their content marketing strategy is geared in the same direction. Their efforts to bring this kind of lifestyle closer to their buyers, present it as a choice that everyone can make, and their honest desire to truly help their audience, can all be felt in their content.

Whole Foods’ Whole Story blog is full of healthy living tips and ideas how to make this lifestyle more inclusive, quality pictures and videos of delicious recipes being prepared in front of your eyes, and pretty much everything else you can think of that can make healthy choices easier, faster and less complicated for their audience. Their Healthy Eating menu features practical content on healthy cooking and useful products that both new and regular readers can appreciate, either as a resource or as a fact-checker.

In addition to this, they also host all sorts of contests and giveaways which have proven to drive even greater engagement for the brand. It’s not just the food they promote that is real, but so are the people behind the social networks who help humanize the business with their friendly and thoughtful comments and helpful ideas.

Direct Advice for Dads

The popular parenting portal dedicated to “the other parent” is a perfect example of how extensive research at early stages can drive the success of your content marketing. Direct Advice for Dads is a blog created by content marketing agency Mahlab Media for the Australian private health insurer HBF. They wanted to reach out and expand their audience of young families, but not necessarily through health-related content like most of the other insures, but to fill in an underserved segment among their key demographic, – soon-to-be dads and men who are already fathers.

Before it ran, the project spent a year in planning and research to understand the content, format, and style that appeals the most to their readers, and made sure that moms are involved too, knowing that they’ll happily share the content with their friends and partners. In just four years they gained over 75,000 Facebook followers and their efforts were rewarded with international recognition and awards.

The website features personal, first-person stories from real men facing the issues and finding solutions in a healthy way, and unlike most other, it does it with brutal honesty, confronting all the emotions, concerns and fears that come with fatherhood. While moms are over-flooded with information on parenting, men are often ignored, and their needs to learn and do better are left unrecognized. That is until DAD entered the scene.

Denny’s Restaurant

Another great example of content marketing based on solid audience research and knowledge is Denny’s Tumblr blog. For years they’ve faced bad press and law suits, until in 2011 Denny’s Restaurant decided to rethink their marketing strategy and get the familiar, warm “diner feeling” they’re known for, back in the brand. It resulted in an entire content marketing campaign that, surprisingly, breaks all the rules, – there’s no valuable content that serves customers’ needs and wants, there are no beautiful images that provoke their senses, there’s nothing to make them think or get serious, just pure fun and laughter. The blog is full with silly memes and cartoons, ranging from smart to totally weird, some of which many would consider even childish, and yet they’ve helped ignite the site’s biggest traffic growth in a decade.

The campaign was running mostly on Tumblr and Instagram, as these social sites best fit its purpose and audience. Still, the content was shared on Twitter and other social media as well, with fans and customers adding to the fun with their hilarious images and comments.

This kind of approach to marketing is a bit risky, as not every audience enjoys such a humor. It turned out successful because Denny’s understood their customers so well and knew why they’re coming to their restaurants. As their chief brand officer Frances Allen says “It all starts with understanding your brand DNA at its core and the role you play in your customers’ lives. You have to know why you matter to them”.

Cisco

Cisco is a top brand in the networking hardware industry and has always used content marketing and social media to great success. They successfully ran a series of videos called My Networked Life, with young professionals from around the globe sharing their personal use of technology to achieve their goals and dreams. Cisco also has a series of blogs on topics that their readers find relevant and valuable. The Network is their main hub for original content, driving most of the audience growth.

The marketing team at Cisco was already aware of the benefits social media brings to their brand when they launched their new Aggregated Services Router, and decided to use the product as a case study to more precisely quantify the ROI of their content marketing efforts and social media strategies. The result surprised the executives, saving them more than $100,000 just because they’ve used social media to market their new product. After that, social networking became part of every launch of the company, resulting in a 281% ROI over a 5-month period, and amounting to an annual cost benefit of over $1.5 billion, according to Cisco’s Social Media Listening Center.

It’s always important to measure the effectiveness of the campaigns you run, as well as every other metric that your data can give you. As the saying goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure, and Cisco’s example shows how one single tested campaign can change the course of all that follows, when measured and understood well.

New York Times

The 167 years old newspaper giant and one of the leaders in print media, confronted with the reality of today’s digitally-obsessed world, but still trying to preserve the unique touch and feel of the written word, ran the NYTVR campaign in 2015 in collaboration with Google, combining the “old” print medium with new and progressive technologies in virtual reality.

Together with the latest New York Times newspaper, over a million of their subscribers also received in the mail their very own Google Cardboard. This original product let users experience the newly created VR app and dive into their favorite story, from walking on a planet three billion miles from the sun to standing alongside award-winning journalists at the center of the action, or talking about next projects with the famous street artist JR in his actual studio. It was a cool and new way of experiencing the news for readers, especially for those of younger generations. If you don’t enjoy virtual reality or don’t have the cardboard, you can simply download the free app and watch the 360-degree immersive videos on the screen, except not in 3D.

Nike

Nike is one of the most active brands online with literally hundreds of social media accounts for many of their different products and geolocations. Their content marketing and social media presence are impeccable, and they have so many interesting and engaging campaigns, it would take a whole other article to cover. Here, we’ll only talk about the way Nike runs their customer support.

Nike has a separate handle on Twitter – @NikeSupport – just for company-customer interaction regarding help and support when needed. And they’re super-fast to respond, always with thoughtful and genuinely helpful answers, often in a fun and playful way. They proactively interact with the following, asking for a shout if someone needs help. This kind of communication helps the brand feel a lot more friendly and approachable to their audience. And that’s one of the reasons Nike are almost synonymous with the sport today, worldwide.

Some of the companies mentioned here are well-known established brands, others are newcomers. However, both of them know the true value of great unique content to engage an audience and generate new leads. They do their best to get to know their audience, and then create content that people want to share and interact with, whether because it is useful, interesting, funny, or newsworthy, or just because it tells a personal story that readers connect with.

Get inspired by these examples and learn from their success stories to skyrocket your own content marketing efforts and set yourself ahead of your competition.

By Mark Delarika 

Sourced from Business2Community

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Twelve Books About Blogging and Content Marketing You Need to Check Out

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The content marketing and the blogging worlds are closely tied together. A common trait of both is that these environments change very quickly. What works this month might not offer good results the next month and you never know when these major changes might occur, because they are caused by many factors.

I’m mentioning this because it can be difficult to find books for blogging or content marketing that can always give you something useful. In the digital world, some practices might be relevant for a certain period of time and then they are never used again. In other words, finding the right resources is so tricky. This is why I’ve decided to do some research and offer book suggestions that you can always rely on.

When it comes to content, no matter if it’s for blogging purposes or marketing, it’s essential that you find sources of inspiration and expert opinions that could shape your style and make your better at what you do. If you want to write well, you need to read a lot as well, and today I am going to give you 12 books that are definitely worth the effort.

Visionaries & Innovators

1. “Nicely Said“

This is one of the most unique content writing books, as it addresses a lot of different approaches and categories of writing you can find online. Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer have really put an effort into helping aspiring web writers learn how to “breathe writing”.

Some of the areas that are addressed in this book include sales writing, blog writing, eCommerce writing, interface writing, creating a voice of your own, and many more. This book really helps you understand what kind of voice you need to create and how to succeed in any kind of web writing. It doesn’t matter if you are experienced or not, this book will prove helpful.

2. “Creative Confidence“

This book is written by two authors, David Kelley and Tom Kelly and it revolves around unleashing your inner creativity to become a better writer. Many writers, even experienced ones, reach a creativity blockade that they simply can’t get over, no matter how hard they try.

“Creative Confidence” is a title that talks about this topic and gives you strategies and principles that can help you be creative. At the same time, it’s written in an entertaining and creative way, giving inspiration in both a practical and artistic way.

3. “The Content Strategy Toolkit“

Having a full-blown content strategy is very important if you want your blog or your site to deliver a great user experience. This is what Meghan Casey emphasizes in this nearly 300-page long book. Within these pages, readers can find a lot of practical advice on how to plan, organize, and create amazing content.

You can learn how to recognize mistakes in your content and find the practical knowledge on how to fix them. It also gets into conversions and how content can impact them while showing you the big picture and how to come up with great ideas for an effective workflow.

4. “Websites That Convert“

If you want to learn more about the online marketing aspect, then this book by Claire Suellentrop will be an interesting read. When it comes to increasing conversion, website design is an important factor, but quality copywriting is equally important, as it allows you to better engage visitors.

This is what the book is mainly about – increasing conversion through good writing. Writing a compelling copy is essential for inspiring the desired behaviors on different sites. This book gives you a lot of insight on this topic, even though its only 85 pages long.

Experts

5. “Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income”

This is one of the most well-known books for bloggers written by experts Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. It’s truly a complete and comprehensive resource that talks about many important things. The primary subject and one of the most important questions for bloggers is how to make money through their work. This book addresses that very question.

The fact that the book has three editions only shows how well it has been received and what important knowledge it shares. It can give valuable information and tips for both novices and already established bloggers on how to start making money from their work.

6. “Clout“

This book was written by Colleen Jones, content expert and the head content marketing strategist at MailChimp. In this book, she explains how you can elevate your web content to a whole new level through 8 important principles that focus on rhetoric and psychology.

The first thing she suggests is to avoid going for the easier, shorter marketing tactics and to take the longer, more difficult road that gives greater results.

She then continues to focus on an important aspect of content – context while giving advice on how to break through some of the most difficult roadblocks. The book also includes many explanations of qualitative methods that can be used for measuring content quality.

7. “How To Make Money Blogging”

Bob Lotich also explained “how to make money blogging” in his aptly titled book. Once again, this book can help both beginners and bloggers who aren’t making money start monetizing their work.

However, Bob speaks from his personal perspective and how he was able to start a blog after getting fired from his regular job and start earning more money. In his book, he shares his stories, the mistakes he made, and the right practices that made him a successful blogger with a stable income.

8. “Writing for the Web“

This book was written by Lynda Felder, an experienced content publisher, and technical writer. In this book, she talks about online content and its quick transformation in a few decades. This book can help readers learn how to keep it simple and get their point across in the best way possible.

The book explores this topic deeply and even gives a lot of examples found on some of the most successful websites. As an extra, it also talks about podcasting and what makes it different than written blogs.

Beginner Friendly

9. “WordPress to Go”

WordPress To Go is a book written by Sarah McHarry. If you are new to blogging or you are seriously considering starting a blog of your own, this book can be very useful to you. Given that most bloggers choose WordPress because it offers so many benefits, getting to know more about this platform and how to use it is the right way to start.

It can be difficult if you don’t know where to start and this book is a guide for complete newbies on how to start a WordPress blog, how to install plugins, themes, how to format content etc.

10. “How to Start a Successful Blog in One Hour“

This book is written by an eBook expert and a professional blogger, Steve Scott. This is a very simple blogging guide which offers step-by-step instructions on how to start blogging quickly.

This book covers the whole process from a beginner’s perspective and explains what a blog is and the fundamentals of blogging. After that, it switches to practical steps on how to use WordPress, how to register domain names, how to acquire web hosting, and much more.

11. “The 4 Hour Workweek“

This classic blogger’s guide for beginners was written by Tim Ferris. This book can be very useful for fresh bloggers who want to start off on the right foot and get comfortable in their new career.

This book can help you learn how to get used to your new habits, organize yourself, and quickly get into the daily routine of being a blogger. This is a must-read book for all aspiring bloggers and new entrepreneurs, and it will help them learn how to focus on what’s most important.

12. “Content inc.“

This is one of the best resources for people who are starting out with content marketing and online publishing. It’s a 350 guide that will teach you everything a beginner and intermediate needs to know about content marketing. It also talks about blog content, how to write it, and how to get noticed by people.

This resource also talks about guest blogging, how it’s done, and how it can be used to grow as a writer. Everyone in the content marketing world knows the name of this author and his book is truly a resource every new blogger can use for a successful start.

All these books are great resources for bloggers and content marketers alike. Of course, as a writer, you need to find your voice and your style, but you also need to make sure that you build them properly. This is how you’ll be able to become relevant and, ultimately, successful.

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Anja Skrba is an expert on Blogging. Anja is a Content Creation Manager for FirstSiteGuide – an educational website which provides tutorials and other useful resources that help people create, grow and maintain their online presence. She’s been in the world of blogging and content marketing for over 5 years.

Sourced from Maximize Social Business

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Why is Content Marketing Essential for Digital Marketing Success?

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The digital boom has changed the way companies interact with customers, making content marketing a crucial strategy for attracting customers and boosting loyalty. Recent research has revealed that two-thirds of people consider content marketing useful, significantly outweighing the 33% who consider it biased. Even when customers know they are reading marketing material, they continue to express interest, with over 50% of those surveyed being more likely to research a company’s products or services after consuming its content. In this post, we highlight the reasons why content is key to any business wishing to remain competitive.

Establishing Brand Authority

Many leading companies are hiring savvy content writers to produce content that will establish them as authorities in their field. By providing white papers, blog posts, insider tips and other content that is actually useful, companies can build trust, which is key when it comes to acquiring and retaining clients. As noted by Forbes, “Having brand authority means consumers will feel confident that you know what you’re doing, and thus that their money is well spent with your company.” Content not only needs to be informative but also curated to clients. Analytics can help companies determine a strategy that includes personalizing content to different target or client groups.

Encouraging Consumers to Engage

As noted in a thesis by J Denham-Smith and P Harvidsson (Content Marketing’s Effect on Customer Engagement), “The goal of content marketing is to provide consumers with content that they are willing to engage with. Ways of engaging in content mean sharing, liking, commenting and adapting the message, then spreading it, thereby creating user-generated content.” In essence, valuable content marketing leads to sharing and recommendations. Create excitement around content enables a company to reach the sites of social influencers, who can significantly boost its brand awareness.

Content Marketing Drives Sales

Over 82% of people make purchases from a company after consuming its content. This statistic highlights the value of investment in content. Your blog may have thousands of visitors and your social media hundreds of likes, but these figures need to be converted into sales if content marketing is to meet its aim. According to Moran (2016), content marketing should possess four key qualities: it should be credible, targeted, differentiated, and measurable.

We have mentioned the key reasons why content marketing is currently a big priority for most businesses that invest in digital marketing strategies. To stay at the top of your game, it is important to produce quality content, but also to curate it to your clients. Ensure your content is shared, commented on, and liked, and measure whether or not it is making a difference to your conversion rate.

Sourced from TECHsling

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3 Simple Changes That Will Supercharge Your Content

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By Zach Heller

Content marketing is an all-encompassing term that has peaked and fallen off in years past. But just because use of the term is on the decline, doesn’t mean that successful content marketing strategies are any less effective.

In fact, the companies that are succeeding with content are using it to drive more sales, more loyalty, more brand awareness, higher levels of community engagement, and more.

But too many companies are still wasting their time doing content for content’s sake. It’s time to take a hard look at the return on investment of your content marketing efforts. What is it doing for you? What value is it adding?

If your content marketing is barely moving the needle, you need to make some changes. And if you are not ready to throw in the towel for good, you need to test some new practices that have potential to improve your results.

Here are three things you can do to get more about of your content marketing efforts:

1) A/B Test Your Headlines

Just like we test different subject lines for our emails, in an effort to get more people to open and read them, we should test different headlines for any piece of content.

A good headline makes all the difference. The right headline grabs attention and leads a user to view the piece of content we publish.

And though there are countless resources for best practices when it comes to headline writing, the only way to know for sure what headline will attract more readers is to test them in the real world. A free tool like Google Optimize will allow you to test multiple headlines for every article and settle on the one that gets the most visits, clicks, reads, conversions, etc.

2) Make It Easy to Share

The sites that succeed with content benefit from engaged readers/users. As a company, there is only so much that you can do to promote your content by yourself. To get real results, you need to leverage the virality of the web.

Content that is easy to share is more likely to get shared.

Making your content easier to share is not hard. There are existing plugins you can add to your website that allow people to publish to their preferred social network with one click. And you can (and should) customize the way your content appears when someone adds them to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and others.

3) Invest in Media

Too many marketers treat content as a one-size-fits-all process. We write blog posts and articles and hope they get shared. But this outdated vision of the web is bound to fail.

Today, there are so many different formats to experiment with, that if you only write articles, you shouldn’t expect to succeed.

It may take more time and money to create engaging video content, live video, Snaps, images, and infographics, but this is exactly the type of content that gets shared. The content and the audience should determine the format, not the team you have or the budget you’re working with.

If budget and people are limiting factors for your company, perhaps you should invest elsewhere and ignore content marketing for now.

By Zach Heller

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Sourced from Business 2 Community

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Mine Competitors for Top Keywords

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One of the best ways to discover keyword opportunities for pay-per-click advertising campaigns, content marketing topics, and search engine optimization is to identify which keyword phrases your company’s competitors are ranking for on popular search engines.

Thanks in part to keyword analysis tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, SpyFu, and Moz’s Keyword Explorer, it is easy to identify competitors, see which keyword phrases they are successful with, and find opportunities to grow your own business.

In this article, I’ll address a few ways to identify the keywords that may be working well for your competitors. In all cases, I’ll assume we are researching for a hypothetical farm and ranch supply retailer, and we will use Tractor Supply, which is perhaps the largest farm and ranch chain in the United States, as our competitor.

Organic Keywords

Let’s start by looking for some of the keyword phrases Tractor Supply ranks for organically. For this example, we’ll use Ahrefs.

The Ahrefs’ Site Explorer estimated that Tractor Supply is ranking for about 1.3 million organic keywords.

One quick search on Ahrefs and we learn that Tractor Supply ranks for about 1.3 million keywords.

 

We can dig a little deeper with the tool’s organic keyword report. This report can be filtered by position on a typical search engine results page, the estimated monthly search volume, the keyword difficulty, and several other factors.

Let’s only consider keyword phrases for which Tractor Supply ranks in the top five positions on a typical SERP. We’ll filter further, returning only phrases that get about 5,000 searches or more per month, and, lastly, we want to target keywords with a relatively low keyword difficulty score of 20 or below, meaning they may be relatively easy to target.

We discover 259 keyword phrases that meet our criteria. Here are a few examples.

Keyword Phrase Volume Difficulty Position
“Coveralls for men” 6,400 7 3
“Air compressor” 112,000 18 4
“Muck boots” 77,000 6 5

If we carry these products, we may be able to rank for them pretty quickly, possibly displacing our competitor in one of these positions.

We could make “Muck boots” a focus of our SEO efforts, develop content around Muck Boots (which is a brand name), or we could consider the term for a PPC campaign.

PPC Keywords

Having identified good organic keywords, we may be interested to learn which phrases our competitor buys. We’ll use SpyFu to identify those phrases.

SpyFu focuses specifically on competitors and helps us discover which keywords Tractor Supply buys for its pay-per-click campaigns.

The tool informs us that Tractor Supply had 61,223 paid keywords. It is generating about 772,000 PPC clicks each month on an investment of around $385,000.

If we start to look at the individual keywords Tractor Supply purchases, we can see that it is buying “waterproof work boots.” The phrase is driving around 12,000 visitors to the Tractor Supply site at the cost of around $3,180 per month.

We can identify the individual keyword phrases and learn a lot about how they might perform.

This information is interesting because “Muck boots,” one of the keyword phrases we identified in the previous section, is a brand of waterproof work boots.

If Ahrefs and SpyFu are correct, Tractor Supply may be driving a lot of traffic to this category of products. In turn, this may be an indication of buying intent. We don’t know for certain, but it may be that shoppers who search for “Muck boots” or “waterproof work boots” do so because their feet are getting wet and they want a solution. Targeting these keywords or similar ones might lead not just to site traffic, but also to sales.

Keywords from Top Pages

A third technique for mining keywords from competitors is to look at a competitor’s best-performing pages and learn which keyword phrases are driving the traffic.

This data can be uncovered with SEMrush’s Organic Research Pages report or Ahrefs’ Hot Pages report, among others. The Ahrefs tool, as an example, listed thousands of individual pages from the Tractor Supply website, including the Muck Boots brand landing page, which was ranking for 863 keyword phrases and earning around 9,400 monthly visitors.

We can examine a competitor’s top performing pages, reviewing the individual keyword phrases those pages support.

We can look through the list of associated keyword phrase and find opportunities. “Muck boots for women” could be a good niche page or the topic of a blog post that featured the styles our store carries for women.

We can use this approach repeatedly to generate a long list of good keyword phrases that may represent buying intent.

Repeat the Process

With just a bit of research, we have several potential keyword opportunities taken from a competitor’s keyword profile. But we don’t have to stop with just one competitor.

Even if we are just familiar with a few competitors, we can generate a list of potential subjects using the very same tools that help us identify their keywords.

We can use SEMrush to generate a list of potential competitors. Tractor Supply, our imagined competitor throughout this article, is just the beginning as we can identify many similar companies using SEMrush’s competitors’ report. For each competitor, there will likely be unique keyword opportunities.

 

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